


Academic Pursuits

by rachelindeed



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A love story in academics, F/M, Gen, but the academics last, the love doesn't work out so well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-17 02:09:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2293052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In pursuing knowledge, he often found himself pursuing her.  A tale of decidedly mixed success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Academic Pursuits

**Footnotes**

Severus loved books, but did not trust them.

In the field of potions, particularly, the textbooks the Board of Governors saw fit to foist on the student body were, at best, outdated, and, at worst, inaccurate. Too many administrators regarded the subject as all science and no art – they expected standard results from standard rules, and in their eyes a potion was simply the mechanical product of immutable theory plus a list of ingredients. They had not revised the curriculum requirements for a quarter of a century, and Severus was willing to bet that the battered book he'd inherited from his mother would still be in service for the next two generations at least. He and Lily had long ago learned to explore other scholarly avenues for themselves, and Professor Slughorn delighted in selectively circulating new materials to his classes in the weeks leading up to major exams.

Six days before midterms, Severus settled across from Lily at their customary table in the library and dumped Antony Frensa's _Variations on Flora in Organic Potions_ out of his bag with all the contempt it deserved. Lily looked up with startled eyes as he began messily unpacking his notes, then she picked up the offending volume and flicked through it curiously.

"What's your problem with Frensa? I liked him all right," she said. "Didn't you think the section on Mies' Conundrum sounded promising?"

Severus looked up and raised a critical eyebrow. "He's fine on theory, but you can tell that brewing bores him, and when he gets bored he gets sloppy. His editor clearly slept through the last three chapters, too; there's no other explanation for errors of that magnitude."

Lily blushed, not having finished those chapters herself, but shrugged and said simply, "I've got a lot to get through this week. You want to save me some time and point me toward the major problems?"

"Look at page five hundred twenty-three."

Lily frowned and flipped the book over, opening the back cover and flicking quickly through the closing pages. Finding her place, she traced her finger down the rows of ingredients; it was the second page of instructions for a very boring, overcomplicated soil repellent solution. Abstract, impractical, and shoehorned into the end of an advanced new work, it was perfect fodder for OWL and NEWT examiners who wished to separate the wheat from the chaff in upper-level Potions. Seeing no obvious mistakes, she bent low over the page, then flipped back to the beginning of the section and settled in for a serious read.

Eight minutes later, she gasped in absolute horror. "Sev! These measurements can't be right! Thirty grams of crushed panthera spine? That's enough to blow a cauldron sky high, and with aconite in the base solution it would turn acidic, too!"

"Mm-hm," Severus murmured, supremely unconcerned and already immersed in another essay. "I'm expecting quite a mess. I don't suppose I could interest you in a friendly wager as to which particular idiot is going to wind up in St. Mungo's after a late-night cramming session? It'll be a sleep-deprived Ravenclaw for sure, but can we bank on more than one? Word travels fast, there'll be only one explosion, but then again they do study in groups."

Lily gawked at him, then cried, "Sev, we've got to tell someone about this before someone gets hurt!"

Severus shrugged. "As you like," he said, waving a hand and continuing with his writing. "Though I think you might consider leaving it alone; it would be an object lesson for those who want to get results without mastering theory. Any fifth-year brewer who pours thirty grams of panthera spine into his cauldron deserves what he gets. Plus, it might knock out some competition over the next week."

"I can't believe you!"

Severus glanced up at her. "Always so earnest," he said softly. "Believe what you like. Do what you like. I'll back you up, if you need help."

"I'm writing to the publishers. And then I'm going straight to Slughorn to make sure he warns every single class about this!"

Severus shook his head, but made no further comment.

Lily came around behind his chair. "Any other errors I should know about?" she asked sharply, and he winced at the clipped tone of her voice. "If you can't muster up any concern for our classmates, you might at least enjoy scrupulously documenting scholastic incompetence, right?" She smiled, but he could see she was genuinely upset.

He set down his quill, twisting around and meeting her eyes to let her see his answer was sincere. "Nothing else dangerous, Lily. He's reversed the measurements of two minor ingredients in his Strengthening Solution, but they aren't vital enough to ruin the potion."

She nodded absently. "I noticed that. But I thought it was just a typo, I didn't bother reporting it, especially since Slughorn writes his own directions for the Strengthening Solution anyway."

Snape nodded, then continued in a lighter tone. "He apparently thinks kappas reside in Monrovia rather than Mongolia, and he occasionally misuses the term 'exothermic.' Other than that, it's the usual substandard fare." He eyed her hesitantly, unsure of how badly he had offended, and feeling desperately tired at the thought that yet more of their precious time was about to be wasted in reproaches and scrambling apologies.

He so longed to be quiet with her.

He made the only honest apology he could. "I'm sorry I upset you," he said.

She sighed, having heard that particular phrase, and its attendant silences, all too often. "I know that." She patted his shoulder awkwardly, then gathered up her things.

"Thanks for telling me, Sev," she said, and the corner of her mouth curled up. "Thank goodness you're such a meticulous overachiever. I can't wait to see Slughorn's face when I tell him you saved Ravenclaw Tower single-handed."

Snape's jaw dropped. "I did not!"

Lily's eyes sparked with unholy glee. "And I'll make sure you get credit for the revisions in the second edition, too! I know you've always wanted to see your name in print."

"Not like that! Lily, I'm serious, leave me out of this!"

She didn't, of course.

It was his first footnote.

~~~~~~~~~

**Discoveries**

Severus could never afford to buy her presents. He gave her spells, instead. Every year at Christmas, and again a few weeks later on her birthday, an envelope with a single sheet of paper appeared in the Gryffindor common room (he never told her how he managed that). Labeled simply 'Lily,' it waited for her on the mantelpiece. After third year he had learnt enough to key it to her touch, so that it fluttered out of the grasp of any other hand that reached for it (James always tried).

The single page within conveyed succinct well wishes – "Happy Christmas" or "Happy Birthday" – nothing more. He saved his creativity for the intricate spellwork scrawled on the back of each letter. For the first few years he offered the fruits of his reading – an obscure potions recipe from some medieval compendium, a neat bit of charms work – but soon enough he began to give her incantations of his own invention.

She remembers the first of them; the morning of her thirteenth birthday, she'd carried his letter up to her room and smoothed it out on the window ledge so that she could read his cramped instructions in the growing daylight. Flipping past his colorless greeting to the back, she read:

'Pourra Hortensis, standard Leviosa movement, end with downward flick to letter's surface.'

She frowned, unsure what to expect, but shrugged and pulled out her wand. "Pourra Hortensis!" she said firmly, twisting her wrist in the familiar rhythm of first-year charms and adding a flourish that lowered the wand tip to paper.

Instantly a burst of flowers sprang out of the window ledge, twining their bristling stems together as they lifted their blossoms toward the sun. Jasmine and bluebells, morning glories and sunflowers, marigolds and, at the center, a Rose of Sharon just like the one she'd enchanted for Petunia on the day she'd first met her friend.

A mixture of floral scents wafted delicately through her room, and the perfume lingered all through the winter. At the end of the year she whispered, "Finite," and carried her undying garden home in her pocket.

It still blooms on the top shelf of the bookcase in her parents' house, though the flowers are strangely translucent now, and their fragrance has long since faded.

She finds that her eyes unconsciously skim over it when she visits home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Discipline**

The art of discipline was the art of words. All ground rules had to be precise, clearly defined once for all and ruthlessly enforced thereafter. That was the heart of power, and every wizard, every Death Eater, every teacher knew as much.

Severus understood discipline, he understood ground rules, and he understood the implacable power of words.

Yet, when Dumbledore asked him for terms, he said, "Anything."

Severus was a wizard, a Death Eater, and now a spy. But he was not a teacher.

"Please, you've got to give me something," Severus insisted. He knew he was shaking with terror and cold, back again on this dark and windy hillside in the dead hours before dawn. It had been two days since his defection; now he heard the terms of his first mission under Dumbledore's command. He was to pass information regarding current prisoners and future raids. He was to risk getting caught in places he had no right to be, talking to people he had no excuse to question.

He desperately needed a cover story, and the Dark Lord had already unknowingly tailored one for him. Months ago he'd been ordered to seek a position at Hogwarts – Voldemort had been trying to place his agents into that sanctuary for years. All Dumbledore need do was employ him, and he'd have a cast-iron excuse for acting like a double agent. Let both sides claim his loyalty; with that ambiguous role firmly in place, he could forge any excuses necessary to gather the information Dumbledore required.

It was elegant. It was practical. It was denied him.

"Please," Severus begged, hearing the desperation in his own voice and appalled at the person he was becoming.

Dumbledore shook his head. "I won't allow you in my school, Severus."

"I don't understand. Why not?"

Dumbledore's glare was stern and slightly incredulous. "Because you assisted in plotting the murder of an infant, Mr. Snape. I don't trust you with my children."

Severus flinched, shrinking back from Dumbledore as he had before, without knowing or caring why. His life was all panic and horror and weakness now, and he had no energy to trace such feelings to their source. But surely Dumbledore must see that his request had nothing to do with children. "I'm not plotting to hurt anyone's children, least of all hers."

"So you say."

"If you don't trust me, then any information I bring will be worthless to you. You've got to trust me, or there's no sense to any of this."

"You've got to start earning my trust, Severus. The information you bring will help. But I refuse to risk anyone else's life or safety for yours, at this stage."

Those were the ground rules, clear and precise. He would gather information without an alibi. If he proved skillful and accurate enough, he would earn Dumbledore's trust. If he made mistakes, he would die.

He pulled it off for ten months.

His lies were elaborate, his information reliable, and his Occlumency superb. He came to know the face of every season on that windy hill. He did not make mistakes. When autumn came again, Dumbledore invited him to his office for the first time and offered him the Potions professorship.

"You trust me with children, now?" Severus sneered, too exhausted to feel relief.

"I do," Dumbledore said, and that was the end of it.

In addition to raising the odds of his survival, the job presented Snape with the chance to dictate his own terms from the head of a classroom. His start-of-term speeches were clear and precise, though most dunderheads misunderstood them. He could not make children into artists by force, but he suspected ruthless micromanagement might just edge a few into competency. This belief was sorely tested over the first few weeks, but nothing except his temper actually exploded. A few Gryffindor seventh-years were idiotic enough to challenge him, and many, many younger students irritated him into cathartic abuses of power. Occasionally, he slept through the night, which was more than he had managed for almost a year.

He'd been teaching for two months when Lily died.

Everything slipped through his fingers, then. He wrote words on chalkboards, in margins, on exam papers. He stood at the head of the class and spoke. He ate, and slept, and moved. He wasn't there.

The children did as they pleased in his class. A few potions went wrong, and he administered first aid with detached efficiency. The majority in most Houses, including his own, decided that, despite a fiery start, he'd turned out soft. They liked him well enough.

Just before Christmas, Dumbledore strode into his office, looking somber, and shut the door behind him with a snap. "Your performance has not been satisfactory," he said. "It will improve, or you will be dismissed on grounds of incompetence."

Severus actually laughed at that.

"I assure you, Professor Snape, I am not joking."

"Headmaster, given seven years of study and one term of teaching at Hogwarts, I know a great deal about the standards of competency you maintain among your faculty. I doubt that, alongside such specimens as Sybill Trelawney, any impartial board of review would find me inadequate."

"I'm glad to hear you mock Sybill's qualifications, Severus. One would think you'd never heard her prophesy. And here I thought you were having trouble forgetting your regrets."

Snape always looked pale as a ghost – he had no color to lose – but anguish raked across him like a sudden chill. He sank into his chair, hands splaying out on top of his desk. He bent forward in waves of coughing; wet, hacking sounds – the closest he could come to crying. He'd exhausted tears long ago.

Dumbledore moved to the other side of the desk, watching with clear eyes. "You are far beyond competent, Severus," he said quietly. "You have done a job which I do not believe anyone else could have managed with success. In war, you have surpassed my expectations." Snape was wheezing, his nose nearly touching the wood grain, greasy hair pooling over the parchments that had scattered under his hands. "Yet now, when I ask you to perform a far simpler job, I find you unfocused, uncooperative, and unable to maintain control of yourself or your environment. I confess that, knowing you as I do, I expected an entirely different set of vices in your instruction – I wouldn't have thought you had it in you to allow these children free rein."

Dumbledore paused to let Snape's coughs slow. "It has been months now, Severus; I cannot go on waiting for you to recover. If you continue wallowing in sad memories and allowing yourself to be provoked this easily, you will become a danger to those around you. Such luxuriant grief is a weakness, and you cannot afford it."

Snape raised angry, hateful eyes, still gasping around the coughs that gathered below the base of his throat. "I…am not…weak."

"Then prove it," Dumbledore said flatly. "Master yourself. Control your grief, and then, I think, you will find it easy to control your classroom."

Those were the ground rules, clear and precise.

Snape had occasion, later, to remember them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Endnotes**

He wrote his last will and testament when he was eighteen. There was a war on, after all.

His worldly possessions were few, and his instructions generally sardonic. He requested the demolition of Spinner's End, though it didn't technically belong to him at the time; he bequeathed his mortal remains, assuming there were any, to the winning side, to be disposed of as they pleased.

He wrote the dismal thing for one reason only – he wanted Lily to have his books.

He knew she would destroy a great many. Anything Dark would disgust her, and most were very Dark indeed. She would treat them like poison; she would read a few of his notes and be violently ill. She just might build a bonfire in her backyard, and treat his work as time would treat his body, leaving nothing but ashes and dust.

But once there was no darkness left to interfere, no life or thought except what he chose to leave and she chose to preserve, scrawled messily in margins, they would be even once again. They would be close, as mind to mind, and she would recognize him. He knew her excitement in discovery matched his own; he knew she would treasure these theories, these potions, this magic. He would tell her everything he knew, everything, and she could choose what to hear and believe, and it would be their childhood relived through ink and paper. She would see his skill, and she would find it impossible to despise his memory. He knew it in his bones; for his books' sake, in death, she would forgive him.

She ruined everything by dying first.

He didn't return to his will until he turned thirty, the year before Harry Potter arrived. He altered nothing except the one clause that mattered. He bequeathed his library to Albus Dumbledore.

He neglected to revise his terms in the year between Dumbledore's death and his own. Accordingly, Ministry officials invaded his home two weeks after his burial. After confiscating two-thirds of the collection on suspicion of illegal and dangerous content, his notes and 'respectable' volumes were packed into crates and prepared for delivery to Dumbledore's next-of-kin. Acting Headmistress McGonagall got wind of this at the last moment and forcibly intervened. Aberforth Dumbledore could have only one use for such a legacy, and she had no intention of standing idly by while he fed Snape's life work to his goats.

After an afternoon of physical and verbal obstruction, and a call to Aberforth – who waived his rights with a shrug – she returned to Hogwarts with an abstruse collection in tow. Glancing through a few volumes, she decided against giving Madame Pince a heart attack by exposing her to the erudite defacements on every page. After a few weeks of research, and one enlightening conversation with young Mr. Potter, she arranged for the Defense works to make their way to the Auror Training Division, while the Potions tomes found a place in Holland's renowned international archives.

Over the course of his career in magical law enforcement, Harry did not spend much time investigating the sources of the spells he used, though had anyone informed him, he would not have been surprised. The hospitals of Europe and the Commonwealth did not advertise the roots of their modified medicines, but that hardly mattered to the men and women who received them.

Severus Snape, slowly and inevitably, became a footnote in history.


End file.
